Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 1867: A Full Sweep

It would be three days before the hero trial results were posted, so Ning had some days to pass. He arrived at the station the very next day, now with nothing keeping him occupied from finding out who it was that wanted him dead.

“Find anything?” he asked as he arrived next to Mira’s desk.

“Sorry? Oh, no,” Mira said. “The guys tried going through the servers in that building, but they could not find anyone who accessed it from outside. If anyone did, they have managed to hide their involvement completely.”

“The guys?” Ning asked.

“Our IT group,” Mira said with an innocent face.

Ning frowned. “Don’t the IT group only have surface-level clearance? You need to dig deeper to find the truth.”

“We can’t,” Mira said. “We legally don’t have the authority to.”

“I don’t remember legality stopping a young woman from sending 3 million Jorans into her bank account.”

Mira’s ears turned red. “I was young and stupid, okay? And I returned all that money. They only let me go because I promised to help them in return and never do it again.”

Ning smiled. “I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Are you trying to get my tech-savvy junior involved in something criminal?” Larissa asked as she walked by with a thick file.

“Nothing criminal, just illegal.”

Larissa turned a sharp eye. “Explain to me how that’s different?”

Ning laughed out loud, dropping the topic. “Okay. Maybe hacking in there is a crime. But what if you got approval from the chief and hacked our own network?”

Mira paused and turned toward Ning with a confused look on her face.

“Why?”

“Because I can guarantee you that he is tapped into this network and looking at us right this second,” Ning said. “Speaking of which. He can’t hear us, right?”

Mira froze and turned around, as if suddenly aware of the many different phones, cameras, and microphones that were spread around the station. She sat up in a hurry.

“Uhh… I’ll ask the chief if I can do a sweep through the network.”

“Thanks.”

Ning turned after Mira left, looking toward the stack of documents that Larissa had on her desk. “New case?”

She stiffened for a moment before shaking her head. “No, an old one.”

“Old?”

She turned toward Ning and gestured toward the phone before making a zipping motion over her lips. She couldn’t speak about it.

“Ah!” he said, realizing what was happening. Larissa had indeed talked about her father’s case—an Imp who was killed, the culprit most likely being a senator.

“Well, let me know if I can help.”

Larissa thought for a moment and handed over a chunk of files. That surprised Ning a little. All this time, she had been so closed off about her father’s case that Ning had barely even learned about it at all from Ragnar. And now, she was letting him see it all for himself.

Ning turned through the pages, reading through witness testimonies. A few of the neighbors talked about hearing a gunshot in the apartment, before two men in dark clothes rushed out of the house in a hurry.

According to the homicide detective at the time, the case was ruled as a burglary gone wrong, with Larissa’s father dead because of an altercation.

Ning read through the paperwork done back then, realizing that the man was actually quite hated by the neighbors. Most of them wouldn’t even have doubted if this was a murder since they had seen him hanging around with the wrong crowd.

Ning flipped through the pages for a while before a question came to his mind that he could not find the answer to.

What did Larissa’s father do?

He wanted to ask, but the woman was worried about the phones being tapped, so she wouldn’t answer him.

Flipping through the rest, he landed on a picture from the scene of the crime. The Imp lay dead in the middle of his room, blood pouring out from his chest.

Ning’s eyes narrowed.

He flipped through a few other photos, finding nothing he was looking for. “Do you have more photos from the scene of the crime?” he asked. “I want to see something.”

Larissa gave a strange look and brought out a pile from among her paperwork before handing it to Ning.

Ning flipped through it, landing on another picture.

“There we go.”

He searched around for some more before he got a greater image of what had happened back then. He dragged his seat over to Larissa and placed the few pictures on her desk.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Ning paused for a moment. “How well can you handle the pictures?” he asked.

“I’ve been staring at them every day for the past 3 years. I can handle it.”

Ning took her for her words and arranged the pictures.

“Can you see this?” he showed, referring to a slightly wet mark on the back of Larissa’s father’s head.

“The wound? He was struck in the back of his head by something hard,” she said. “The coroner said he might’ve been struck hard with a gun.”

“Easy mistake to make,” Ning said.

“Mistake?” She gave a confused look.

“What if it wasn’t a strike with a gun? What if he hit his head on the shelf here?”

There was a broken shelf to the side, which the detectives at the time had believed to be the doing of the burglars, who had attempted to unearth some hidden money.

“Why would he hit his head?” Larissa asked.

“Because he was shot in the chest,” Ning said. “Three bullets to the chest and he falls backward, hitting his head on the shelf.”

“Okay… what does that change?” Larissa asked.

“If this was a simple burglary, the criminals would have no reason to flip him over and lay him on his chest,” Ning said. “They did so because they needed to make it look like a burglary. Like they had to steal his wallet.”

Ning showed another picture, showing the rest of the room. “But the thing they were actually searching for was somewhere else they could not find.”

Larissa’s eyes narrowed. “His diary!”